The Segway PT — The Revolution That Stayed on the Sidewalk

The Segway PT was a two-wheeled, self-balancing Personal Transporter that was supposed to change how cities were built and instead became a tourist novelty and a punchline. Inventor Dean Kamen unveiled it on December 3, 2001 on ABC’s Good Morning America, after a year of feverish speculation about a secret project codenamed “Ginger” and “IT.” On July 15, 2020, after nearly nineteen years on the market, its parent company Ninebot rolled the last unit off the production line and ended the original Segway for good.

The gap between the hype and the result is the entire story. Before anyone had seen it, the device drew claims that it would be “to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy” — a remark that captured the breathless register of the pre-launch leaks. Investor John Doerr reportedly suggested it might be bigger than the internet; Steve Jobs is said to have called it as big a deal as the PC. Cities, the prophecy went, would be redesigned around it. What actually arrived was a $5,000 contraption that topped out around 10 mph, weighed too much to carry, and looked faintly ridiculous in motion.

Reality arrived quickly and stayed. At five thousand dollars the Segway was priced like a used car for the performance of a brisk walk; it was too fast and too heavy for sidewalks, which many jurisdictions promptly banned it from, and too slow and exposed for roads. It found real customers — police departments, security teams, warehouse staff, and tour operators steering tourists in single file past landmarks — but never the mass market it had been promised to remake. The pop-culture verdict was sealed by Paul Blart: Mall Cop and a decade of comedians: the Segway was what you rode to look important while going nowhere fast.

A darker note hangs over the company’s history. In December 2009 the British entrepreneur Jimi Heselden bought Segway Inc.; on September 26, 2010 he died at 62 after riding an off-road Segway model off a cliff into the River Wharfe near his Yorkshire estate. Across roughly nineteen years the PT sold only about 140,000 units in total, and by the end accounted for around 1.5 percent of the revenue of Ninebot, the Chinese firm that had acquired Segway in 2015. The company that killed the PT did so to concentrate on the e-scooters and self-balancing gadgets the Segway’s own technology had quietly helped inspire.

The Meta Portal — The Good Camera Nobody Wanted Facebook Watching Through

The Meta Portal was a smart video-calling display with a camera that followed you around the room, and after four years of decent reviews and indifferent sales the consumer version was discontinued, with Meta confirming its exit from the consumer market in June 2022 amid cost-cutting at its money-losing Reality Labs division. Facebook launched it on October 8, 2018 as the $199 Portal and the $349 Portal+, built around a “Smart Camera” that automatically panned and zoomed to keep callers in frame as they moved. The hardware was genuinely good. The problem was whose name was on it.

Portal arrived at the worst possible moment for a Facebook-branded camera in the living room. The launch came months after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a breach affecting tens of millions of accounts, into a public that had just learned exactly how Facebook treated personal data — and was now being asked to install a Facebook camera that auto-tracks human movement on the kitchen counter. Facebook anticipated the objection and engineered against it: a hardware button to electronically cut the camera and microphone, a physical lens cover, on-device processing, and repeated assurances that it neither watched nor kept call contents. Reviewers largely agreed the device worked and the safeguards were real. The trust the device required, Facebook had already spent.

So Portal sold modestly. It found its truest audience not among friends and family but among businesses, where it became a useful remote-collaboration tool during the COVID-19 pandemic — reportedly rising from around 600,000 units in 2020 to roughly 800,000 in 2021, figures attributed to internal estimates rather than disclosed sales. Even that was a rounding error against Meta’s ambitions and against the billions Reality Labs was burning on the metaverse. In June 2022, as Meta postponed AR glasses and canceled a smartwatch, it ended consumer Portal production and refocused the line on the enterprise.

What Portal proved was uncomfortable for its maker: that the company could build a polished consumer device and still fail to sell it, because the deciding feature was never the camera. It was the brand attached to it.